There has been a known method of communicating characters by electronic mail between information processors such as personal computers having a communication function in a network such as the Internet or an intranet or between communication equipments such as mobile phones connected to a public communication line and connectable to the Internet. In the following description, the apparatus capable of communicating by electronic mail as described above is generally referred to as a “communication terminal.”
When an electronic mail message is transmitted from one communication terminal to another communication terminal, a mail address specified for the communication terminal as a destination is specified in an outgoing mail composing window at the one communication terminal, so that the electronic mail message can be transmitted.
A network such as the Internet or an intranet has at least one mail server, and a mail server managing the mail addresses of recipients is provided with mailboxes for the respective mail addresses, and distributes incoming electronic mail messages to mailboxes corresponding to the mail addresses for storing. A mail server passed through during transmission determines the mail address data of a recipient specified in the data of the outgoing mail, and transfers the electronic mail message to the mailbox of the specified mail address.
The communication terminal, which can transmit and receive electronic mail messages in this way, may transmit the same electronic mail message to multiple destinations for the purpose of, for example, distribution of bulletins or notification to general users. Therefore, the electronic mail software is generally provided with a function of simultaneous transmissions to multiple destinations.
In an outgoing mail composing window, for example, if a destination or recipient field or section is filled with multiple destinations separated by commas or semicolons, the communication terminal running the electronic mail software determines that the electronic mail message is to be sent to the multiple destinations, and transmits the electronic mail message with the same contents to the multiple mail addresses corresponding to the names filled in the destination or recipient section.
In recent electronic mail software, multiple destinations can be grouped and registered under a single group name. Therefore, in such software allowing the group registration, a sender may simply specify a group name as a destination in order to transmit an electronic mail message with the same contents to multiple destinations.
The electronic mail software is provided with an address book for recording destination addresses. The sender does not have to type the address of each recipient using the keyboard in composing an outgoing mail message but simply reads out the address book from a storage such as a hard disk drive in the communication terminal to select and specify the mail address of the destination.
Not only personal names but also group names can be registered in the address book. The address book registered with group names has a hierarchical structure, and the sender, for example, double-clicks a group name to display a window showing details of the group and can refer to or edit personal names or mail addresses of all the members registered under the group name.
As described above, with a communication terminal running conventional electronic mail software, multiple mail addresses can be separated by commas or semicolons in order to specify multiple recipients (destinations) and send them an identical electronic mail message at a time. Destinations can be more easily input using the address book. In addition, an electronic mail message with the same contents can be transmitted to multiple destination by simply selecting a group name registered in the address book.
With such a communication terminal running conventional electronic mail software as described above, if a message should not be transmitted to one of the multiple destinations registered under a group name in the address book, for example, the group name could not be used to specify the destinations and individual addresses would have to be specified one by one from the mail addresses in the address book.
In the above case, if the number of personal mail addresses registered under the group name is small, the trouble is of little consequence. However, if the number of mail addresses registered under the single group name is large, selecting all the mail addresses of the group members from the address book should be troublesome and could lower the work efficiency.
Furthermore, in an intranet or the like, a mail server in the network may be provided with an address book in which a group name representing mail addresses of all members of the group including a user concerned is registered, and if the user specifies the group name as a destination, a user's electronic mail message is also transmitted to the user him/herself.
In order to solve the above problems, a technique has been suggested in which registered contents of mail addresses included in a single group name registered in the address book are read out and edited, and the edited contents are registered under a new group name, before specifying the destinations of electronic mail. The new group name can then be specified as a destination, so that only a relatively simple re-registering operation is necessary for transmitting an electronic mail message to multiple correct destinations even if the destinations under the original group name are not entirely in agreement with the destinations of the electronic mail.
However, with the above method of re-registering the addresses under the new group name and specifying the name, the items to be registered under the group name are edited and re-registered before composing an outgoing electronic mail message, which is cumbersome, and still complicated as in the case of inputting all the mail addresses. In addition, if the number of personal mail addresses registered under the group name is small, for example, specifying all the mail addresses from the address book could be quicker. In groupware such as Lotus Notes (TM), only an administrator can change and register the contents of a public address book, and therefore a general user (client) who is not an administrator cannot register a new group name in the public address book. Therefore, a general client user of the Lotus Notes cannot re-register in the public address book and specify a new group name.
In order to solve this problem, a known destination selecting method according to the disclosure of Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 10-257051 provides an option which allows the addresses of all the members registered under a group name to be displayed so that desired addresses can be selected therefrom when the destination is specified by the group name. An electronic mail message is transmitted only to the selected mail addresses under the notation of the group name as a destination. This method could be used by a client user of the groupware in which the original public address book is not changed and the destination can be changed only once in transmitting the electronic mail message.
According to this method, however, the members of the group whose mail addresses have been selected would believe all the members of the group have received the electronic mail message, while any members left out have not received the electronic mail message. Therefore, there arises disparity in acquired information between the members though they are unaware of it.
In addition, according to the above method, if an electronic mail message to group members is to be also transmitted to a mail address other than the group members, the mail address must be separately specified as a destination in addition to the group name. In that case, the recipient of the electronic mail message at the mail address might feel insecure about possible information disparity from the group members because the destination is specified by the mail address.